this week in art

CREST HARDWARE ART SHOW

Tools are not always what they seem at Crest Hardware (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Crest Hardware & Urban Garden Center
558 Metropolitan Ave. between Lorimer & Union
Daily thorugh August 31, free, Monday – Saturday 8:00 – 7:00, Sunday 10:00 – 5:00
718-388-9521
www.cresthardwareartshow.com
crest hardware art show slideshow

The annual Crest Hardware Art Show is an exhibit like none other, a fun, lighthearted display spread throughout the Brooklyn store, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. More than one hundred artists have works on the shelves, down the aisles, hanging from the ceiling, and out in the garden, most of which are made of and/or comment on objects available at the popular hardware store. Priced from $10 to $8,888, with most works between $100 and $500, the show is like a treasure hunt, with a majority of the pieces artfully “hidden” as if they are regular hardware items. Chelsea Bahr uses toilet seats in “All the Things I’ve Read on the Pot.” Bernadette Scelta paints a paintbrush painting in “Paint a Wall and Clear Your Mind,” which evokes Magritte as it hangs among the paintbrushes. A pair of rats with a broom are not happy in Peter Pracilio’s “Damn Housing.” Aya Rosen and Ruti Dan create offbeat faces using unusual materials in “Where the Midnight Summer’s Dreams.” Jilly Ballistic places gas masks on Marilyn Monroe and a would-be subway rider that resemble nearby safety goggles and paint odor respirators in “Seven Year Itch à la Jilly Ballistic” and “E Train to World Trade Center.” Joseph Silva’s “50 Shades of Gray” features fifty squares of different shades of the color gray as if they were paint swatches. Jude Ferencz uses wires to create such Tim Burton-inspired works as “Crucified Copper” and “Copper Skate Punk.” Damien Olsen’s “Bill Murray” tells the bizarre tale of a hungry alligator and an unfortunate person. And visitors are encouraged to put on the headphones and groove to Kayrock’s self-DJ’d “Emergency Synthesizer Tool Box.” Other pieces incorporate power drills, hammers, watering cans, ladders, wrenches, chain saws, flashlights, nuts, bolts, locks, spray paint, pliers, lamps, screws, rat traps, duct tape, and other hardware elements in inventive ways. The Crest Hardware Art Show is a great way to spend a few hours when one of you wants to see art while the other is getting ready to do some home improvement. Sales from the works benefit the City Reliquary, the museum and civic organization down the street on Metropolitan Ave.

RICHARD AVEDON: MURALS & PORTRAITS

Richard Avedon, “The Mission Council,” silver gelatin prints, five panels mounted on linen, printed 1975, © The Richard Avedon Foundation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Friday through July 27, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-741-1717
www.gagosian.com
www.richardavedon.com

Born and raised in New York City, photographer Richard Avedon began taking pictures at the YMHA when he was twelve, eventually honing his craft while serving in the Merchant Marine during WWII and studying at the New School. Renowned for his fashion photography, Avedon, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty-one, also specialized in silver gelatin portraits that explored the sociopolitical climate of America, particularly between 1969 and 1971. “My photographs don’t go below the surface,” he once said. “I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.” Extended through July 27 at Gagosian’s Twenty-first St. gallery, “Richard Avedon: Murals & Portraits” features spectacular murals and intimate portraits that have beautiful surfaces indeed while providing plenty of clues about the state of the nation. Spread out in an awe-inspiring space designed by David Adjaye that holds surprises around every corner, the smaller portraits and massive murals — which run as high as ten feet and as long as thirty-five — feature such seminal counterculture figures as the Chicago Seven, Allen Ginsberg and his family, and Andy Warhol and such Factory denizens as Paul Morrissey, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Viva, Taylor Mead, and Gerard Malanga in addition to members of the Mission Council, a group of war administrators who influenced U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There are also smaller portraits of writers Brendan Behan, Julius Lester, and Jean Genet, activist Julian Bond, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky naked, civil rights lawyers Leonard Weinglass, William Kunstler, and Florynce Kennedy, Nixon secretary Rose Mary Woods, and Vietnamese survivors of napalm attacks that put the pro- and antiwar movements and the sexual revolution in perspective, supplemented by vitrines containing paraphernalia relating to the nearby photographs and specific subject matter. Made before the era of digital manipulation and Photoshop, the large-scale murals, which include some subjects twice in the same series of panels, hang loosely behind sheets of plexiglass in an almost nonchalant way that adds to their mystique. The lighting also affects the murals, casting shadows of the men and women across the floor and even reflecting the mural opposite; although it was most likely accidental, it is quite intriguing to look at the eleven men of the Mission Council with a small, subtle reflection of nude factory members ghosted over them.

OUR HAUS

“Unattended Luggage” by Time’s Up gives visitors a chance to explore personal aspects of immigration and home (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Daily through August 26, free, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-319-5300
www.acfny.org
our haus slideshow

In 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang, “Our house is a very, very, very fine house.” The same can be said of architect Raimund Abraham’s stunning Austrian Cultural Forum tower, which turns ten this year. In honor of the anniversary, the ACFNY has put together the multimedia exhibit “Our Haus,” consisting of specially commissioned works that explore the nature of home, the physicality and psychology of place, and the cross-cultural link between New York and Austria. Spread across four floors of the twenty-five-foot-wide, eighty-one-foot-deep, twenty-four-story building that ACFNY director Andreas Stadler calls “an artistic lighthouse in this metropolis of creativity and communication,” the show includes photography, painting, video, sculpture, and site-specific installations that curator Amanda McDonald Crowley says “recognize the ACFNY as a space for conversation, contradiction, intimacy, and conviviality.” In Brünnerstraße 165, Helmut and Johanna Kandl go back to Johanna’s childhood home, combining vintage Super-8 footage of her as a little girl playing in the backyard with contemporary video of her rising out of a pond on the now-abandoned property. Austrian-born artist Rainer Ganahl examines two sides of New York in “Haunted Houses — Vacant Buildings on Third Avenue between 99th and 120th Street,” a two-channel video that he made while riding his bicycle through his adopted home of Spanish Harlem; while the bottom images depict stores and signs of life, the top shows broken windows, empty apartments, and shattered dreams. Judith Fegerl’s “Untitled (cauter)” intrudes on Abraham’s tower itself, as electrical wires burn lines onto the wall. Time’s Up investigates travel and immigration in “Unattended Luggage,” which invites visitors to look through drawers in a large open suitcase filled with items that remind one of home. Matthias Herrmann conjures up Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Bruce Naumann in a series of still-life postcards, free for the taking, that he made during a New York City residency.

Rainer Prohaska’s “Floor Cuisine, ACF New York” offers a place to gather at the Austrian Cultural Forum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In 1982, the British ska band Madness sang, “Our house it has a crowd / There’s always something happening,” and the same can be said for “Our Haus.” Rainer Prohaska’s “Floor Cuisine, ACF New York” features kitchen stations throughout the exhibit, culminating in a table downstairs where people can come together and enjoy a drink from Mathias Kessler’s “Das Eismeer, Die gescheiterte Hoffnung (The Arctic Sea, the Failed Hope),” a refrigerator stocked with beer and containing a sculptural tribute to Caspar David Friedrich in the freezer. Meanwhile, the collective WochenKlausur has set up a meeting room that will host various gatherings over the course of the exhibition; through July 22, “It Came from chashama” will highlight works from the nonprofit organization that displays art in public spaces. (The Center for Urban Pedagogy takes over July 23-29, with a panel discussion that first night at 7:00, followed by Green Guerillas, CAAAV, and Not an Alternative.) And in conjunction with the anniversary, Anthology Film Archives is hosting “The Austrian Cultural Forum New York: The First Decade,” a series of screenings through July 22 of Austrian films made over the last ten years, including Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread, Götz Spielmann’s Revanche, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, and Ruth Beckermann’s Zorro’s Bar Mitzva.

JAMES ROSENQUIST: F-111

James Rosenquist, “F-111” (detail), oil on canvas with aluminum, 1964-65 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art, fourth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through July 30, $25 (includes same-day film screenings)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
f-111 slideshow

First flown in December 1964 and officially deployed during the Vietnam War in 1967, General Dynamics’ $75 million F-111 Aardvark multipurpose tactical fighter bomber was a prime example of cutting-edge weaponry in its time, built with taxpayer money. In 1964, New York-based artist James Rosenquist, who grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota, raised by parents who were amateur pilots, began what would become one of his most powerful and influential installations, “F-111.” Designed as its own room, “F-111” has been reconstructed at MoMA and is being shown as it first was at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965, along with eight framed preparatory pieces that give insight into Rosenquist’s creative process. Resembling a four-walled billboard (Rosenquist was a former billboard painter), “F-111” consists of twenty-three colorful wraparound panels that meld consumer and advertising culture with ironic militaristic imagery. A pretty little girl is getting her hair done under the nose of the jet plane. A mushroom cloud is exploding under a rainbow umbrella. A fork is digging into spaghetti. Flags in a white cake proclaim its health benefits. A diver is swimming through a nuclear explosion. The eighty-six-foot-long mural took Pop art to another level, not merely re-creating familiar societal images but juxtaposing them with an instrument of mass destruction while the country was escalating its involvement in a controversial war. The immersive installation, inspired in part by Claude Monet’s large-scale works, provides a dizzying sensation of inescapable rapid-fire imagery that Rosenquist says on the Acoustiguide “felt to me like a plane flying through the flak of an economy.” Rosenquist, perhaps best known for paintings that look like they’ve been torn to reveal another work beneath it, here places his messages front and center, creating a visual collage of images that effortlessly flow into one another. On the audio tour the artist also notes that the plane’s “mission seemed obsolete before it was finished.” All these years later, Rosenquist’s “F-111” seems far from obsolete itself, perhaps even as relevant as ever.

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL: THE CLOCK BY CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour masterpiece unfolds in real time at Lincoln Center

David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center
61 West 62nd St. at Broadway
Tuesday – Thursday, 8:00 am – 10:00 pm
Friday at 8:00 am through Sunday at 10:00 pm
July 13 – August 1 (closed Mondays), free
212-255-1105
lincolncenterfestival.org

Two years ago, the Whitney presented “Festival,” a thrilling interactive retrospective of the work of Christian Marclay, featuring multiple site-specific installations and live performances. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist followed that up in winter 2011 with a supreme work of utter brilliance, the captivating twenty-four-hour video The Clock, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. Having traveled around the world, The Clock is back in the city for a special engagement at the David Rubenstein Atrium as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Screened in a large, dark gallery with roomy, comfortable seats, the film unfolds in real time, composed of thousands of clips from movies and television that feature all kinds of clocks and watches showing the minutes ticking away. Masterfully edited so that it creates its own fluid narrative, The Clock seamlessly cuts from romantic comedies with birds emerging from cuckoo clocks to action films in which protagonists synchronize their watches, from thrillers with characters battling it out in clock towers to dramas with convicted murderers facing execution and sci-fi programs with mad masterminds attempting to freeze time. Marclay mixes in iconic images with excerpts from little-known foreign works, so audiences are kept on the edge of their seats, wondering what will come next, laughing knowingly at recognizable scenes and gawking at strange, unfamiliar bits. Part of the beauty of The Clock is that while time is often central to many of the clips, it is merely incidental in others, someone casually checking their watch or a clock visible in the background, emphasizing how pervasive time is — both on-screen and in real life. Americans spend an enormous amount of time watching movies and television, so The Clock is also a wry though loving commentary on what we choose to do with our leisure time as well. The Clock will be shown 8:00 am to 10:00 pm Tuesdays through Thursdays and continuously from 8:00 in the morning on Fridays through 10:00 at night on Sunday. Admission is free and first-come, first-served, with a maximum of ninety-six people, so be prepared for some very long lines, especially during prime time. Since the film corresponds to the actual time, midnight should offer some fascinating moments, although you might be surprised how exciting even three o’clock in the morning can be.

SUMMERNIGHTS 2012

Howard Fishman and the Biting Fish Brass Band will kick off SummerNights at the Jewish Museum on July 12 (photo by Nisha Sondhe)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, July 12, 19, 26, $15, 7:30
212-423-3337
www.thejewishmuseum.org/summernights

“Performance is a religious activity to me,” Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and composer Howard Fishman wrote in March on the Huffington Post. “I don’t proselytize. The faith that I have is personal. I don’t believe that there is one right way to live, or that any group of people that has organized themselves under the name of a particular brand of religion has all the answers. But my experience tells me that we can make ourselves available to many of life’s mysteries by listening to a sort of inner voice, whatever we want to call it.” Fishman will share his inner voice and more as he opens the Jewish Museum’s SummerNights 2012 series on July 12, backed by his Biting Fish Brass Band, which includes trombone, trumpet, tuba, and drums. SummerNights continues on July 19 with local Balkan soul gypsy funk favorites Slavic Soul Party! and concludes on July 26 with One Ring Zero, the Brooklyn experimental klezmer outfit whose Author Project consists of songs with lyrics by such writers as Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Dave Eggers, and Paul Auster. There will also be free Chozen ice cream available and an open bar, and the galleries will remain open until 8:00 so you can check out such exhibitions as Kehinde Wiley’s “The World Stage: Israel” and “Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940.”

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND — ALL ME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WINFRED REMBERT

Winfred Rembert will be back at the Maysles Institute on July 11 to once again share his fascinating life story

ALL ME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WINFRED REMBERT (Vivian Ducat, 2011)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Wednesday, July 11, $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.allmethemovie.com
www.mayslesinstitute.org

Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. The film was previously shown at the Maysles Institute this past January, but it’s now back for a return engagement July 11, with Rembert and Ducat participating in a Q&A following the screening of this extraordinary story.